James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin on Gaiman and the Art in Sandman

James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin had an interesting back and forth on Gaiman and Sandman in comments, which I thought I’d reprint. (I haven’t reprinted everything they said, and there were other folks in the conversation too…click through to the thread for the whole back and forth.)

Yes, anyone can do comics, but few can master them. The book perhaps reflects that Gaiman doesn’t truly understand the art of graphic storytelling. It is as if he views comics as a stepping stone to other, more profitable forms of expression. I doubt that he is aware why the best comics bearing his name are those done by highly-skilled cartoonist P. Craig Russell, who adapts Gaiman’s text entirely to the comics medium and adds his own sense of timing and poetic visual orchestration to the pages. Left to his own devices, Gaiman’s work is verbose to the extreme. His better artists such as Charles Vess, Dave McKean, Jill Thompson or Chris Bachelo can add extremely sophisticated visuals to the work, but they are exceptions rather than the rule; one gets the sense that to Gaiman, artists are expendable and interchangable. He rarely discusses their contributions with much acuity or depth. He is the star of his own show, so his most lasting legacy is Vertigo’s writer-centric crediting system, writers in large type on the covers, artists as appendages.

I’ll concede that it is Vertigo who have long had the tendency to put out comics with pages by one artist cut through with jarringly random pages by another, that it is Vertigo who decided to make the writers’ interests supercede that of the artists, beginning the negative credit trend that has infected the entire industry. Perhaps I am overmuch blaming Gaiman and those of his fellow writers who allow this type of thing to happen—maybe they don’t have a say in a policy that gives them the advantage. I do like the Russell adaptations much more than Gaiman’s other work, but I also admire a few of the other collaborations, particularly the Shakespeare revisioning with Vess and and the inventive Mr. Punch with McKean. And I suppose I could be holding it against him that when I met the guy he was dismissively rude.

It does seem that the “Best of” series feels interchangable with the Anthologies of Graphic Fiction and that hardcover McSweeneys collection in that many of the same cartoonists are in all of them, and have been lumped together to form a sort of “new establishment” of comics. I begin to feel bad for some of the individual victims who do not deserve to be made part of any army but who because of this generalization appear ripe to be overthrown, as all establishments deserve to be.

Eddie Campbell on the prominence of Neil Gaiman’s credit on the Sandman jackets, from TCJ #273:

In the latest editions of the Sandman books, I noticed Neil Gaiman’s name up along the top there, as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It’s taken some getting there, but it finally got the author’s name on the top of the book. And any artist who’s ever worked on that, I think, he or she knew full well they were doing so as Neil’s guest. Neil is the author of those books. Doesn’t mean he’s the only person working on them, any more than David Bowie’s the only person working on one of David Bowie’s albums.

Gaiman wrote “Ramadan” as a short story for Russell to adapt. He wanted to see Russell give it the treatment given to other works such as the various operas and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.

I haven’t read a Sandman episode in about fifteen years, so I can’t say how well they hold up. (I looked at Mr. Punch again in conjunction with the poll last year, and I gave up on it after about 20 pages.) Regardless, the Sandman material is one of the few things in comics one can show people outside the subculture and have a reasonable expectation that they might hook into it. Gaiman may not be a good storyteller per certain factions of the comics subculture, but his stuff has an appeal to the culture beyond that. He’s one of the handful of comics creators this can be said of, and I think it’s nothing to sniff at.

Robert added:

As for the substance of Eddie’s statement, I actually agree with you for the most part. I do think Gaiman’s collaborators are the co-authors of the individual stories they work on with him. However, I also believe that Gaiman should be considered the author of the Sandman series overall. Eddie made a music analogy, so I’ll make one, too. “My Little Town” is a Simon and Garfunkel record, but the album it appears on, Still Crazy After All These Years, is a Paul Simon solo album, and rightly so. He’s responsible for the direction of that album in the same way that Gaiman was responsible for the direction of the Sandman series. The collaborations don’t change that.

Eddie does most of his work on his own, and so is, I think, self-effacing and somewhat less invested in his collaborative mode…he can afford to be generous with credit.
I suppose you are making a case that Gaiman is like the late Harvey Pekar, another writer whose work I admit that I am not very fond of, who also worked with a lot of different artists, did not have much of a visual sensibility (IMO) and dominated the credit on his collaborations. I guess I can see your point. The bottom line for me is that I am not usually interested in the comics done by either of these writers, it seems to me that much of their work could just as easily have done in another medium…it is no surprise that they both gravitated in more recent years to film.

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Hope it’s okay that I highlighted this James and Robert. I really like that James ended up with the Harvey Pekar comparison; I think that’s pretty apt for both better and worse.

I’m curious too James and Robert…what comic writers, as opposed to writer/artists, do you think have a strong visual sensibility, if any? I feel like Alan Moore does and Grant Morrison really doesn’t…but it’s often hard to tell, it seems like….

I don’t think my disgruntled comments deserved a post of their own, and I backpedalled somewhat from my initial outburst. That being as it may, yes, Alan Moore is enough of an artist to anticipate or even partially direct the visual presentation of his narratives. I don’t know if Grant Morrison can draw or not, but he definitely writes for the strengths of a visual medium. I imagine that Bob Haney was similarly attuned to the potentials of the medium; his stories always hinged on their visual presentation. Having worked with both Jamie Delano and Peter Milligan at Vertigo, I think both have a pretty good awareness of how something will look that they have written. Bruce Jones is a wonderful artist in his own right and so certainly understands what does and doesn’t work in comics. John Arcudi has very good taste in art and this informs his tight, suspenseful horror comics.

There’s some interesting stuff about Gaiman as a visual collaborator in the Steve Bissette book about him (Prince of Dreams, I think it’s called). His way of working is very much unlike Moore’s (who usually maps it all out ahead of time in full scripts). By description, anyway, Gaiman likes to work way more collaboratively…hanging out with his collaborator and discussing both the story and the look/feel of the world with the artist, before retreating back and mapping out a script based on the discussion. This, I think, is esp. the case with his McKean collaborations, but also with the Miracleman work with Mark Buckingham.

Clearly, this was less the case with the ongoing Sandman series (with a revolving cast of artists—some better than others), but I still think James’ comments are kind of unfair to Gaiman’s work. Each arc of Sandman tends to have a strong visual feel that fits the story (I’m fond of Shawn McManus’ work on “A Game of You” especially…) and I doubt this is completely independent of Gaiman’s input. In some ways, I think it’s fair to say that Sandman can, at times, be “overwritten”–in the sense that Gaiman often doesn’t let the visuals do the storytelling, but has a heavy density of words which aren’t always “necessary” to convey the plot and actions. At the same time, I appreciate the fact that Gaiman takes care in the composition of his words, and usually the words add texture, mood, etc., even when not strictly necessary to convey actions/plot. Perhaps he could trust his artists more to give this texture/mood, but the truth is, very few comics writers have “a way with words” like Gaiman does. He might as well use the talents he has. In the other post, the reader calls Gaiman “coy” and prefers Ennis and Ellis… I’m not sure what “coy” means in this context, exactly. It seems the accusation is that Gaiman is too subtle…. I’ll take the subtlety over Ellis and Ennis any day, frankly (and neither of those authors had the knack of actually writing comics that appeal to large numbers of women). I’ve read a bit of both Ellis and Ennis, and preferring their “writing” to Gaiman’s seems wrong to me. As “mainstream” comics writers, they’re better than most…but Gaiman’s Sandman is better (his more recent stuff for the medium is terrible…but now he’s treating it like slumming)… He’s a bit on the snooty side, I guess…but as faults go, I’d rather that than a number of other infractions.

Thanks! I’ve been in the hell of a 2-hour a day, five-days a week summer class for the last four weeks, but it’s finally over (exam tomorrow!). I hope I’ll have more time to write stuff after the middle of July.

what comic writers, as opposed to writer/artists, do you think have a strong visual sensibility, if any?

That’s a hard call, in part because a good number of comics scriptwriters, including Moore and Morrison, started out as cartoonists or artists themselves. A good number of the scriptwriters who entered the business before the ’90s had some kind of cartooning or art background. Goodwin, Wein, and Shooter, among others, could draw at or near a professional standard.

Outside of Moore, I’d say Frank Miller’s collaborations with Bill Sienkiewicz and David Mazzucchelli work pretty well. I like Jean-Michel Charlier and Alexandro Jodorowsky’s collaborations with Moebius quite a bit. Kazuo Koike has a penchant for some off-putting content at times, but his work with Goseki Kojima and Ryoichi Ikegami is very fluid.

Pekar, Gaiman, and Sampayo’s collaborations all seem a bit clunky to me. So do Garth Ennis’s. I like a lot of the work, but the flow isn’t there like it is with the stuff above. When the art is compelling, it seems that way despite the scripts, not because of them.

Overall, though, I think it’s hard to say without having seen the scripts and comparing them to the final work.

I should add that I do think strong scriptwriting is far more important when it comes to making good comics than strong art. Dilbert can’t begin to compare with Mutts in terms of visual elegance, but I’d rather read Dilbert because the writing is so much sharper. I remember Sandman and Preacher being far more worthwhile reads than Hellboy. David Mazzucchelli’s art for Batman: Year One is superior to his work on Daredevil: Born Again, but Born Again is the better book because the script is stronger.

While I certainly enjoy accomplished artwork, and I agree it can elevate otherwise negligible material–just look at Toth’s career, for example–I think a strong script with mediocre art is more likely to be a better comic than a mediocre script with strong art. The art just has to be good enough.

Huh…I might have agreed with that at one point, but I’m not sure I do now. Dilbert can be funny…but the art really pisses me off to the point where I find it very hard to enjoy it. That’s the case for Doonesbury too, to no small extent. Whereas, Little Nemo is amazing despite writing that is not exactly great literature, in the sense in which such things are usually understood.

Robert, I think your preference for good script over good graphics is — and I don’t mean this in a nasty way — purely personal. Some readers go one way, some go the other way, some are variable.

e.g. I’m with you on Preacher v Hellboy, where the art’s clearly better on Hellboy. Dillon is no slouch by any means, but his work there is pretty utilitarian. But Born Again over Year One? That’s crazy talk! For me, the art on Year One pushes it well, well over the line — but that’s just for me, for that particular book. It varies, and I think it varies too much, both intra- and inter-personally, to make a general decree one way or the other.

I’ve read a lot of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison comics drawn by shitty, shitty artists — well, only a few Alan Moore ones because he’s picky with his collaborators, although there was that nadir in the 90s when he slummed at Image. That Spawn/Wildcats thing, for instance — jesus christ. But there’s lots and lots of Morrison comics with shitty art and …yeah, I’m done with that now. I’d much rather read Frazer Irving working to a (let’s say) Kevin Smith script than a Morrison script with graphics by (let’s say) Philip Tan.

No rule in the arts is ever absolute. There are certainly cartoonists whose work is so strong visually that the modesty or weaknesses of the writing just seem beneath concern. But those cartoonists are very rare. Winsor McCay is probably the most obvious example. Others would be Jack Kirby from the mid-’60s to the late ’70s, Crumb (particularly the work from the Early Counterculture period), Moebius, and Gary Panter. I’m sure there are a few others that aren’t immediately coming to mind, but not too many. I don’t think Toth or David Mazzucchelli’s work rises to that level.

Readers in the subculture tend to put a far higher premium on visual skill than readers outside it. I’ve never come across anyone outside the subculture who talks up Bill Watterson’s graphic abilities; they like Calvin and Hobbes because it’s a funny, entertaining read. The complaints about the artwork of Scott Adams, Cathy Guisewite, and Ted Rall are invariably from subculture readers; the ire Rall provokes from outside readers is invariably about the writerly content of his work. When you look at the six major crossover graphic-novel efforts–Maus, Watchmen, Fun Home, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, and Sandman–only Jimmy Corrigan is the work of an accomplished visual stylist. Watchmen is unusual; Dave Gibbons is a mediocre artist in general, but the book maximizes his strengths while pulling off the trick of turning his weaknesses into virtues. The other four are nothing special art-wise, and all have been subjected to a good deal of criticism and even hostility from subculture readers on that basis.

I can understand how indifference to visual craft can be annoying, but it’s the result of a cultivation that I can’t fault people for not having. Comics are reading material, and once the visuals achieve a certain level of competence, everything beyond that is generally–although not always–an extra. With a car, the most important things are the engine and the other utilitarian elements. An elegant body design and paint job are nice, but they’re not essential.

I don’t think that the subculture/mainstream division works quite as neatly as you’re saying…or, at least, there are different subcultures and different mainstreams. Chris Ware has won a lot of acclaim specifically for his design skill, and adamantly not only within comics, but in the gallery world — and, indeed, from places like This American Life, which is pretty mainstream. Crumb also gets a lot of fine art props. On the other hand, I think most people can tell that Dilbert is quite, quite ugly. It’s not like you need a degree in comicsology to notice that.

I also think you’re maybe overselling the lack of visual grace in some of the works you pick. Alison Bechdel isn’t Chris Ware, but she’s a very accomplished cartoonist, and Fun Home is very much about her cartooning sense as much as about her writing (as Connor just discussed at some length.) Persepolis also has a very distinctive and appealing visual style, which I think has a lot to do with its success. Dave Gibbons is not the world’s greatest drafstperson…but I think you can argue that Watchmen is a virtuosic visual accomplishment in other ways, and that that accomplishment very significantly affects the book’s reputation. I definitely dislike the art in Maus…but I dislike the writing, too. Both are professional and distinctive, and both certainly contribute to the success of the book, both for comics lovers and for other readers.

And for C & H…people might not articulate an enthusiasm for the art, but Watterson is very, very self-conscious as an artist — many of the strips are specifically and deliberately about his virtuosity, whether it’s drawing like Picasso or orchestrating a Hobbes attack across a Sunday strip. I don’t think you can separate out “enjoyable read” from Watterson’s use of art to generate gags and make his world.

My larger point is that I think the comics subculture and its various factions make a much bigger deal out of visual chops than readers outside it. I didn’t mean to say that people outside the subculture are oblivious to visually accomplished work, or that visuals don’t matter. I’m sorry if it came off like that.

I don’t have any real argument with your first paragraph. As for your examples… I write above that Ware is an “accomplished visual stylist,” and I’m perfectly comfortable including him in that list above with McCay and the others. I did include Crumb on that list, and I’ve written elsewhere that the “Early Counterculture work not only defined Crumb as a major figure in the world of comics; it’s earned him a spot in the history of 20th century visual art as well.” I actually feel Crumb is best appreciated as a fine-art figure; I think many people in comics heavily overrate the literary aspects of his work. As for Dilbert, I can’t imagine anyone thinks it’s well drawn; the quality of the art is just beside the point.

It was never my intention to characterize Bechdel, Satrapi, and Spiegelman’s art in these books as amateurish. It isn’t. But I wouldn’t argue that any of it rises much above the pedestrian. (I don’t think that’s a fault, either.) Off the top of my head, I remember James criticizing Bechdel for her heavy reliance on photo-reference. Gil Kane savaged Spiegelman’s visual approach in Maus and stated the book would have been better off as a prose piece. Tim O’Neil opened his TCJ book-of-the-year essay on Persepolis with, “Marjane Satrapi is not a very good cartoonist.” These are not isolated opinions within the comics community, either.

Obviously, the visual treatments contribute to the success or failure of any comics work. If the visuals aren’t capable, the books can’t achieve their effects. But the evidence strongly suggests that conspicuous visual virtuosity is not a determinant of quality for readers outside the subculture to the degree it is for readers within it. With the crossover graphic novels, only Jimmy Corrigan and, in its idiosyncratic way, Watchmen, are particularly characterized by the bravura of the art. The emphasis outside the subculture seems to be on the quality of the narrative, not the visual flair with which it’s presented.

My subculture/larger culture binary is a simplification, a generalization, and a conceit. It’s a way to frame my observations about different aesthetic values among what I perceive as distinct cultural communities. It’s meant to be suggestive, not definitive.

I just think Bechdel is much more lauded for her art than you’re suggesting. I mean, I don’t really like the art…but I don’t really like the writing either. The bulk of the reviews of Fun Home I’ve seen speak glowingly of both art and story.

With Maus…again, I don’t really like it, but it’s much praised for the way it uses different visual valences and plays with visual metaphor. And I think the art in Persepolis is charming; it’s one of the things I personally like about it, anyway.

I think in some sense I might agree more if you said that the subculture cares about art, and the mainstream basically doesn’t care about craft at all, either in writing or art. As with most things that are popular, the popularity seems to have more to do with a combination of marketing factors (including subcultural cache, high concept, newsiness, demographics, random luck) rather than with any particular developed aesthetic, either verbal or visual.

As an example: Batman Year One has been much, much more influential than Daredevil: Born Again…but that’s not because of art or story, but because of the relative profile of the properties involved and the vicissitudes of Hollywood.

the subculture cares about art, and the mainstream basically doesn’t care about craft at all, either in writing or art.

I can go along with that.

There are a lot of reasons why Batman: Year One is more prominent than Daredevil: Born Again, including what you say. A big one, though, is that Marvel just hasn’t been as good a publisher in some respects as DC. Until about 15 years ago, Marvel couldn’t get their trade paperback line distributed to bookstores, and they’re really bad about keeping key books in print. (Bill Sienkiewicz’s stature has been the most hurt by this, I think.) DC got Batman: Year One bookstore distribution from the get-go, and their backlist maintenance is first-rate. If anyone’s been curious about Batman: Year One over the last 25 years, all that’s been needed is a trip to the local Barnes & Noble. Anyone interested in Daredevil: Born Again has had to hunt for it. You can’t make a book a perennial that way.

It seems obvious that Miller’s best collaborations work as well as they do because he is an artist himself and knows to write to the visual strengths of who he’s working with, be it Mazzuchelli, Gibbons or Sienkiewicz. I tend to think that writers like Moore, Morrison and Gaiman do the same and that they work best when they work with cartoonists with the initiative to influence the storytelling, rather than people who are more of illustrators. Russell in his adaptations paces Gaiman better than the writer paces himself, Moore’s best IMO are with Gibbons and Nowlan, Morrison’s with Quitely.
Spiegelman’s strength is his structure, not his art per se; in that he is quite similar to Steranko, I think. The bulk of their work is in the thought that goes into it. Art does not come easy to Jim or Art, they both have to work hard at it. Maus still looks to me like rough layouts.
My criticism of Bechdel was prompted by her comments in The New Yorker that she took photos for every panel in her more recent book, which seemed excessive to me…perhaps she achieved a level of realism in expression that she wanted, but the process sounds more like a joyless crutch to me. It put me off wanting to read the book. Using reference is one thing, but tracing to be able to produce a large volume of pages is another. One might as well just make fumetti comics at that point.
I don’t get the sort of disparaging remarks made about Toth and Kirby. Yes, Toth’s body of work is somewhat flawed by the shitty scripts, but there is a lot of value to nearly everything he touched, and that is because of what he did. Kirby’s best work is as good as comics has ever had in both text and art.
And Stan Lee I think has little sensibility one way or another. I believe that his artists came up with most of the significant visuals in the work, along with most of the story ideas. But Gene Colan for instance told me he enjoyed working with Stan the editor because he gave Gene so much freedom to do the stories how he wanted….the thing that rankled wasn’t that Stan took full writer’s credit and pay for what was glorified copywriting, it was that he didn’t care enough to watch out for his collaborator’s interests.

I said Kirby, among a handful of others, was a cartoonist “whose work is so strong visually that the modesty or weaknesses of the writing just seem beneath concern.” I don’t value Kirby’s stories that highly–to each their own–but I don’t consider a comment like that disparagement by any means.

With Toth, I wrote that his career is a testament to the capacity for accomplished artwork to elevate otherwise negligible material. I also indicated that I don’t think he’s a stylist on the rarified level of McCay, Kirby, and a handful others. Again, I’m not seeing disparagement. The first statement is a compliment, and the second is hardly an insult.

I said “sort of” disparaging and I did cite Kirby’s BEST work, which to me is a relatively small group of his solo stories from various books he did in the 1970s. And Toth, well, I think he’s probably the single greatest interpretive comic artist ever, so we just don’t agree. No biggie. Noah making this conversation a post has assigned it undue significance.

“the subculture cares about art, and the mainstream basically doesn’t care about craft at all, either in writing or art”

This sounds right to me. Above, I was going to say something like “most readers actually value script above graphics — witness the popularity of Y the Last Man or The Walking Dead“, until I remembered that the scripts on those aren’t really any better than the graphics.

Here’s another thought, though: it seems to me that the option of valuing script-writers over graphic artists only really emerges (for English-language comics!) in the 80s, at least for semi-discerning adults. Before then, whose scripts are you going to read comics for, Roy Thomas? Robert Kanigher? Maybe, just maybe Kurtzman, but it’s not like his collaborators are shoddy in the way that some of Morrison’s or Gaiman’s have been.

Yeah, the stories were largely wretched until relatively recently. It is clear that both art and text are important, both need to be done well. And I think it is rare for a single individual to be good at both, there are writers who write and artists who draw. Many would do well to collaborate….we all gain in getting more and better work to enjoy. But the bottom line is that collaborations don’t work if someone feels the need to dominate…it must be an even split.

Really though, I annoy myself….Eddie Campbell is right, I’m too negative a lot of the time. Perhaps Gaiman is a bit mushy, has appropriated all the great works of literature and myth and likes his name in lights, but truly, at least he doesn’t do comics about a lot of people running around punching each other in the face. Anyway, I’ve been trying not to write so much about things that aggravate me…um, well, I’ve hardly written anything at all. But actually that was because I’ve been drawing more. And there are a lot of things being done right in the alternative/literary comics zone that I love, so I’ll try to write about them, instead of ragging so much…